Inside the FBI's biggest nightmare yet

FBI Director Kash Patel arrives to testify before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on oversight of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S., September 15, 2026.

Crossed storms are hitting the FBI simultaneously. The question is how much of the trouble the FBI’s Kash Patel pushing Donald Trump’s agenda is responsible.

Andrew Bailey this week became the second deputy FBI director to walk out in a year. It came after an internal dispute that seems to involve reassigning two veteran counterterrorism supervisors who had challenged an order to investigate harassing phone calls to conservative podcaster Katie Miller, wife of White House deputy Stephen Miller.

But the departure also followed what now has emerged to be a serious breach of the FBI’s own personnel files by a global hacking group that is putting the lives of past and present FBI agents and their families into personal danger. The break-in and data theft by ShinyHunters, which appears to operate across the world but independent of any state direction, itself follows the significant cutbacks by the Trump administration to the nation’s counterterrorism efforts in the FBI, Justice and Homeland Security.

Bailey, the former Republican Missouri attorney general, had been recruited by Trump to take the unusual co-deputy director job after the departure earlier this year by Don Bongino, a former Secret Security agent, who wanted to return to his life as a podcaster over doing the work of crimefighting. Bailey was silent about his departure, though it was known that he and Patel did not work well together.

The cutbacks against serious efforts to enforce cybercurrency rules ordered by the White House also showed up in a report by Democrats on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which found that Iran has been using trades in stablecoins to elude U.S. sanctions on its oil sales. The investigation uncovered that 84% of 846 sanctioned crypto wallets linked to Iran transacted exclusively or near-exclusively in US-backed cybercoins. Where is the FBI?

Of course, Kash Patel himself constantly seems to be running to keep his job, refusing to share with senators answers to questions about FBI operations or to explain the use of agency money and resources on his personal life.

It Wasn’t Me

Patel, the Miller couple, and the White House also say they knew nothing about demoting Michael Burgwald and Courtland Rae, who led counterterrorism operations at the FBI’s Washington Field Office after the pair challenged orders to investigate harassing calls to Katie Miller. We are supposed to believe the field office itself demoted the pair.

The veteran FBI officials said that harassing phone calls received by Katie Miller did not meet the legal threshold for an FBI investigation and had no connection to terrorism.

They were not fired, as other agents have been, but removed from their roles overseeing counterterrorism efforts.

According to CNN, White House and senior FBI leadership asserted that the agents were stifling investigations into serious threats and made a unilateral decision to oust them. The move drew internal friction, and Bailey subsequently resigned. It is unclear whether Bailey supported removing the veteran agents.

The Millers have criticized the FBl’s lack of concern over their personal security. Previously, career agents reportedly pushed back against using bureau resources to investigate critical neighborhood paper flyers targeting Stephen Miller, for example. The Millers and their young children moved from their Arlington home into military housing last fall while law enforcement was investigating protest activity targeting the family, which the Millers viewed as criminal threats.

Patel apparently told subordinates that he was displeased with the office’s progress on the Millers’ case, but that he did not order the decision.

The Hack

Meanwhile, the concerns about an FBI not being able to protect itself against a major cyber hack seems like some kind of black humor.

By all accounts, the FBI is still trying to determine how hackers got access to tens of thousands of files with personal identifiable information or what the hacking group intends to do with the data. Only portions have been released, though there are fears that wide portions could be offered or sold to enemy nations. The group itself said its intent was not to put lives at risk but to get the FBI to back off investigation against the group itself.

The hack was being compared with China’s breach of more than 20 million records from the Office of Personnel Management over a decade ago, which prompted official vows to never allow it to happen again. Of course, that was before Donald Trump would bring his anti-U.S. intelligence attitude to bear. Hundreds at the U.S. counterintelligence systems have been fired, and Justice, Homeland Security and FBI have largely abandoned counterterrorism efforts to move personnel to immigration deportations.

In an email to The New York Times, ShinyHunters said that the bureau had until the end of Tuesday to fulfill its request to withdraw an advisory aimed at their group. There was no indication that the deadline meant anything had happened.

“Since the very beginning we had made our decision that we would never publish this data,” the group said. “We have never intended to, nor have we ever planned to.” It wanted to protect itself, the email said.

Security experts said that the breadth of the records would make them valuable to foreign spies, who could build elaborate dossiers on FBI agents.

Most of the information about the breach has been through internal memos to the FBI staff itself. Patel has been mostly silent.

Terry H. Schwadron retired as a senior editor at The New York Times, Deputy Managing Editor at The Los Angeles Times and leadership jobs at The Providence (RI) Journal-Bulletin. He was part of a Pulitzer Gold Medal team in Los Angeles, and his team part of several Pulitzers in New York.

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